| NJ5 said: When I said "these billions" I meant all of the money they've lost so far. Geez do I need to spell out everything? Isn't it obvious from several of my posts that I meant all of the losses so far? I'm pretty sure that, as of the slim, they are now overall profitable (SWprofits-HWcost) Let's wait and see... if I remember correctly, SCE's only planning to start making consistent profits in the next fiscal year (and that, btw, is also what they said last year). Look, all I'm saying is those price cuts and their effect were way too radical to be planned. The best example is that Sony cut the EU price by 33% (200 €) before the PS3 even had its first holiday here. Surely you can't tell me with a straight face that that was all according to plan too. |
But that's the problem, "these billions" is not a fixed number at all and is not very viable to the debate. Using that phrase can mean any number of things, 1 billion, 3 billion, every billion, etc.
Who's to say how much they expected?
A) I think there was a misunderstanding because my intial understanding was that Sony knew it was going to lose something. It didn't know exactly how much at first and so just had a tentative number, and then as time went by and economy bottomed out, that number changed.
B) My understanding of what you meant when you wrote "these billions" was that they did not expect to lose any billions. So, that was a misunderstanding.
C) What you are saying I guess, is that they didn't expect to lose as much as they actually did. But I would still disagree. Like I wrote above, they had an idea, and events in the economy changed that number to a different one.
Now, back to the subject we were talking about; sacrifice.
In A) sacrifice fits because they knew they were going to lose something
In B) sacrifice does not fit, because of factors like higher profit, (not dropping the price as quickly), etc etc
In C) sacrifice fits because although they did plan to lose an arm, you are saying they didn't also expect to lose a leg. But they did plan for the arm.
So, even though B is the interpretation I chose to understand, it is also the only one capable of representing your greater argument of the situation not being a sacrifice right?
I'm just confused at why there was such a misunderstanding here. I only understood in such a way that would be accurately representative of your statement. I didn't mean it to "spin" your words and set up a straw man argument. So let's try to be civil from here on out.
About them dropping the Euro prices so quickly, the 40GB also dropped price to 400$ in the US. The two consoles are the same, both are the 40-GB model with no BC. The sale both came at around the same time, and were hailed as excellent decisions. Additionally the exchange rate with Europe actually makes Japan more money than the sale in the US did. These cuts were necessary as the company was seeing a huge amount of pressure from both devs and customers. Again, it goes back to whether or not you think they knew it was a sacrifice. If they don't sell consoles, they don't make money, and obviously, nobody is going to continuously buy a 600$ console no matter how good the games were.
It's been shown that the number of games that are sold are generally over the course of ownership. That means you need to get install base as high as possible immediately, because over time it makes more money. It's like getting the extra skill points per in fallout. Getting it later does not give you retroactive points.
BR was an important success.
And whether they originally expected to lose 3B or 6B doesn't make a difference, because BR is worth many more billions.
